I was taking pictures of a pile of trash — tires and couches, mostly, tossed into an overgrown South Dallas lot — when a man in a blue van pulled up next to me. "Mr. Cruz?" he asked, and I told him, no, sorry. He shook his head, pulled over and got out.

The man, who would identify himself only as Bill and gave his age as "older than dirt," said he thought I was Mr. Cruz with Code Compliance and had come to clean up this mess, one of many in this part of town.

The initiative — called "Community Clean!" — will extend code's hours and is set to begin with a workshop intended to clean up three target census tracts and engage residents there. Nadia Chandler Hardy, the assistant city manager over Code Compliance, asked the council for $1.5 million worth of new equipment — dump trucks and Bobcats and so on — needed to assist abatement crews tasked with collecting the garbage dumped across the southern half of this city.

The $1.5 million is currently just sitting there, budgeted dollars going unused while the city tries to fill vacancies in Code Compliance.

Right now the city has but three abatement crews working all of Dallas, "Not even half of what we need," Chandler Hardy said. And clean-ups are spread across three departments: Code, Sanitation, Street Services. That system is "not efficient," she said. The new trucks would get the number of Code Compliance crews up to five. Still not enough. But better, slightly.

Overgrown weeds at 3105 Mallory, a former church now rotting in the Fruitdale neighborhood just west of Interstate 45.

(Vernon Bryant/Staff Photographer)

Fruitdale, where horses and sheep graze near overgrown lots, is one of three census tracts the city will begin blitzing with is new code enforcement initiative.

(Vernon Bryant/Staff Photographer)

Code, which employs around 285 enforcement officers, is already deeply backlogged: Chandler Hardy said Monday that the city has 10,000 outstanding service requests, either through 311 calls or officers in the field stopping to write citations.

She said half of the outstanding requests, involving shabby houses, overgrown lawns, and dumped furniture and tires, are in the three census tracts getting the full-court press in coming weeks and months. But the trash and weeds and rot spills out beyond those boundaries.

Burned-out homes are decorated with faded code violations and lawsuits targeting owners with faraway addresses. Along Tanner Street, just off Malcolm X, a trailer filled with old TVs and office chairs and barbecue grills rots in front of a half-built house where construction stopped after it, too, caught fire. On Monday a man walked by and snatched a bright green golf club from the trash heap and kept walking.

A homeowner along Tanner, who also didn't want to be identified, said only, "That's just the way it is down here."

This is the trash heap I was shooting when Bill came by and asked if I was the code official come to clean up this mess in South Dallas.

(Robert Wilonsky/Staff writer)

Bill told me the trash and tossed-out couch lying on its side across Meyers Street near the cemetery and Opportunity Park weren't there last week. But they'll remain for another three weeks or so, when it's time for the monthly clean-up, he said.

The boarded-up house next door, too, is tolerated because it's ignored, just part of the scenery. There's not even a code violation notice tacked to its peeling-paint front. Bill said he couldn't remember anyone living there in the 40 years he's been down here.

Bill was resigned to the inevitable and echoed this neighborhood's apparent mantra: "That's just the way it is."

Mayor Mike Rawlings, with a month left in office, said Monday that the code blitz is meant to prove to residents that the city hasn't forgotten about them — that "we care about them." In doing so, he said, "It gives us a better place to stand to challenge these neighborhoods to do better."

But no one, least of all the residents, believes this blitz to be a cure-all for southern Dallas. And council members were as skeptical Monday as you likely are now.

Adam McGough, a former community prosecutor who dealt with code issues, said all he heard were promises and buzzwords. He wondered how such a push in three areas could be sustainable when so many more are in need of the same tending-to.

A few months back I asked City Manager T.C. Broadnax how city employees could drive past Shingle Mountain as it grew and grew along S.M. Wright in plain sight and not stop to see what the hell was happening? Broadnax said he had no good answer, because there wasn't one. He said anyone with "a caring eye" should have seen it and stopped and asked what was going on. But they did not.

And so another community went ignored. And another community stopped believing that City Hall cared about them. And another community stopped calling City Hall to complain, because why bother? That's just the way it is.

"The concern I have is when people stop calling because we've failed to come," Broadnax said. "And when no one calls, the conditions persist. I've heard too many times: People have stopped calling, and people have stopped caring. But I grew up in conditions like that. That's the only reason I am city manager, to make sure people don't have to live in conditions like that."

Trash heaps like this one along Herrling Street off Second Avenue in South Dallas are far too common.

(Robert Wilonsky/Staff writer)

Like Broadnax, Chandler Hardy grew up in a neighborhood filled with boarded-up windows behind which there was prostitution and the selling of drugs. She said she remembers what it was like to be abandoned by City Hall in her Florida hometown. So she would rather try this than do nothing. Because nothing is all these neighborhoods have ever seen.

"We first as a city have to say this is not acceptable and begin to work at it," she told me Monday. "The experience of empty and broken promises or straight-up neglect, that's not acceptable."

She said she sees her past when she drives through South Dallas or the neighborhoods of Fruitdale. And she knows what these residents feel. Because as a young girl, she felt it: "I feel angry."